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‘Quit Being a Whiny Party’: Carville Blasts Dems For Complaints About Stalled Biden Agenda

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Long-time Democratic operative James Carville leveled criticism at members of his own party over the weekend amid complaints about Joe Biden’s stalled agenda.

The comments came on the heels of two defeats: One, Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ agenda, a multi-trillion-dollar climate and social spending measure, and two, a voting reform bill that Republicans charged would federalize nearly all elections to Democrats’ advantage.

Carville specifically pushed back on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd who was lamenting Democrats’ lack of accomplishments on those two pieces of legislation as well as the COVID-19 pandemic: “[Q]uit being a whiny party.”

“You gloat, and you promote….[Y]ou run on what you’ve got. You don’t run on what you didn’t get. And the stuff you’ve got is pretty good,” Carville, who advised former President Bill Clinton, said.

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“You talk about the fact that – we pretend to care about child poverty, although no columnist that I read in the paper ever talks about it. It’s the lowest child poverty rate we’ve had in history,” Carville continued.

“We claim that we care about hourly workers. Hourly workers today have more leverage at any time they’ve ever had in my 77 years of existence on this planet, right? You talk about, we want jobs — 6.4 million jobs, more jobs than any president ever created in the first term,” he said, though the vast majority of those positions were simply being refilled after they were lost during the first year of the pandemic due to mandatory shutdowns.

Todd then asked Carville how Democrats could get those positive messages out to progressive voters who are discouraged, leading the legacy operative to respond that the party should not remain focused on “some word in a dictionary.”

For months, Carville has been warning Democrats about the pitfalls of being a “wokeness” party, describing it as “a big ‘problem’ that everyone is aware of.” He also warned that “people [are] way more interested in their lives, and how to improve them, than they are in somebody else’s pronoun or something.”

Following Democratic losses in Virginia and New Jersey in November, as well as GOP gains elsewhere, Carville proclaimed: “What went wrong was this stupid wokeness. …[Y]ou’re hurting the party. You’re hurting the very people you want to help.”

Another Democrat, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, agreed, telling Fox Business host Neil Cavuto in November:

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I think that the American people, it’s clear as we saw in Virginia, it’s actually a positive sign that they’re rejecting the kind of divisiveness, the racialization of everything in this country, the fomenting of anger and hatred, that unfortunately, we’re seeing coming from so many of my fellow Democrats, and they’re standing up and saying, ‘Hey, we want to choose an optimistic future, a hopeful future, a future where we can live up to that dream of Martin Luther King about judging each other by our character, not by the color of our skin, respecting each other as fellow Americans and Democrats and Republicans actually coming together to work towards a shared goal, a shared objective of doing what is best for the American people and our country.’”

“That’s the direction that we need to head in. And I think the Virginia governor’s election was a positive indication of voters taking a stand and letting their voices be heard through the ballot box,” she added.

As for Carville, he advised that Democrats have accomplishments they can and should run on in the 2022 midterms.

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“I care that somebody, an hourly worker is not sitting there working away at $7.25 an hour. And I see these signs all over, even in Louisiana and south Mississippi, $700 signing bonus. Those are, those are real accomplishments. And it’s something that you can run on,” he argued.

He said of the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed that children “are going to ride on better roads, have better broadband, cross better bridges. I mean, this is something we ought to be really proud of as Americans and we ought to talk about it, we ought to brag about it, we ought to tell people about it.”

“Again, you don’t talk about what you didn’t get. Democrats whine too much, Chuck. Quit being a whiny party and get out there and fight and tell people what you did and tell people the exact truth. The Republican Party stands for nothing other than let’s relitigate the 2020 election,” he added.

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